In certain fields of technology, e.g. telecommunications, a complete system may include a variety of equipments from various types and manufacturers. This is true not only at the hardware level, but also at the software level.
System Management and other purposes make it desirable that equipments in a system (“client components”) can access a number of properties of other equipments (“application software components”). It is further desirable that this be made possible substantially without human intervention at runtime, and with minimal human intervention before runtime.